Review: Steal Me For Your Stories

There was a quote in a recent Lawrence Welk skit on Saturday Night Live
that said something like, “Isn’t love beautiful when it’s gross?” I’m
bringing this up because I believe it aptly describes Rob Todd’s
nauseatingly wonderful story collection Steal Me For Your Stories.
I don’t mean “nauseatingly” in a bad way, but in a good way. Sometimes
it’s good to feel sick while you’re reading. Then you know what you’re
reading is real, because it hits you in the gut.

Steal Me For Your Stories is a
collection about love, and how love is mostly not wonderful, but painful
and, well, gross. The opening story, “Our Costume Is a Kiss,” follows a
couple who for Halloween dress as that famous photograph of a soldier
passionately kissing a nurse at the end of WWII. It’s an iconic image
that Todd turns on its head by having the real story be about the male
figure’s rocky past with his mother and the news that she is dying. A
bomb has just been dropped on this man’s life, just as bombs were
dropped in Japan signaling the end to one side of the war, but beginning
an entirely new set of warlike conditions for another country. Because
really, when you think about it, no one knows the true story of that
famous photograph of the soldier and the nurse, and if we think about it
too hard, we might not like what we actually see. That is exactly what
Todd excels at in his writing: opening up the easily visible into
something not so easily viewed.

Life is gross, and Todd does not shy away
from any of the gritty details. In “Drunk Dynamite Fishing” a bachelor
party travels to a South American country and wreaks havoc in more ways
than one. They drink and eat and fuck themselves into an oblivion that
is so very American, it is hard to read any further. Although we all may
not recognize ourselves in these men, they are nevertheless engaged in
activities that exploit a country they do not even understand. In “Proof
That God Loves Us And Wants Us To Be Happy” a man sits in a run-down
bar and observes the young and hot bartender that serves him. Her body
and demeanor are one thing, but on closer inspection her story is so sad
and lonely that when the man must excuse himself to use the restroom
due to a painful anal fissure, what he sees come out of his body is not
the most revolting thing the reader has seen in this story. And in one
of the last stories, “Quiet The Remedies,” a couple goes about their
day: having sex, not having sex, arguing, eating, just sitting. At one
point the girl says, “I know you are just going to steal me for your
stories,” and it feels like the entire world of Todd’s collection is
encompassed in that one line, not because it is the title, but because
what his characters have observed throughout the pages come together and
unite into one, solid vision.

This collection is fantastic
and dark and funny and, yes, gross. It’s more than just reading about
people doing every day things; it’s reading about how we live within our
own lives.

***

Joellyn Powers(Books Editor) will be entering the MFA program for fiction at American University this fall. Her work appears in Bluestem, Twelve Stories and Metazen, among others. You can follow her on Twitter @hipsternonsense, or on her blog about nothing at especiallyfreeing.tumblr.com.